I was unable to find a way use the normal controller helper module mechanism to provide column overrides because I was generating my AS enabled controller dynamically. This simple AS plugin provides a new attribute to columns that you can pass either a string representation of code or Proc and that code will be executed in the same way as a <column_name>_column(record) helper method.
The actual plugin might not be useful to many people, but it is a nice simple example of how to override and extend Active Scaffold.
http://groups.google.com/group/activescaffold/web/active_scaffold_list_eval.tar.gz
Unpack tgz file into your vendor/plugins directory
Set the list_eval property on a column object to a code string or Proc.
config.columns[:title].list_eval = <<EOS
if record.title.length > #{@@max_title_length}
content_tag :abbr, record.title.first(#{@@max_title_length}), :title => record.title
else
record.title
end
EOS